Government by Goons

By Nicholas Stix
Originally published on April 24, 2000, in A Different Drummer.


Last month, it was Lady Hillary's Secret Service detail smacking around six journalists at New York's St. Patrick's Day Parade, and the mainstream news outlets killing the story. Yesterday, it was an INS SWAT team knocking journalists at Elian's uncle, Lazaro Gonzalez,' house to the ground, holding guns to their heads to keep them from doing their jobs, and ... mainstream news outlets again killing the story. Big Media told of the protesters getting maced and smacked around, because the protesters are the "bad guys," and they were just getting their just desserts. "Out of the way, bitch!" Out of the way, ink-stained kvetches. Out of the way, everyone.

Gee, journalists getting smacked around -- what a shame. Oops, but it's the Clinton's palace guard doing the smacking. It's hard to know who to cheer on. But I can't get excited about anyone stopping journalists from doing their job, even when they're giving the business to my left-of-Stalin colleagues. Granted, these are people who spit, when they hear the name, "Nixon." And yet, if the government can smack around journalists of one persuasion, it can do it to those on the other side of the fence, as well.

But what are we to make of Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder claiming, immediately after the raid, that no weapons were involved? Thank goodness, Associated Press photographer Alan Diaz trespassed, hopping a fence, so that we could see the most shocking picture of the year, and know quota king Eric Holder for the liar he is.

And so, we are left without a videotape. Maybe next time, we won't have so much as a report. The scary thing is, politicians learn from each other, across party lines.

In New York, for instance, Rudy Giuliani learned from his predecessor, David Dinkins, that you can "reduce" welfare by simply getting clients to sign up for much more remunerative, federally-financed social security disability (SSI) payments, instead. SSI isn't counted as welfare. Voila! Welfare magically went down a few points.

Then, Rudy came up with his own innovation, the crime report reduction policy. Some major felonies -- including murders and rapes -- simply were not reported to the press, and many other crimes were defined down -- felony assaults became misdemeanors, and misdemeanor assaults became non-crimes. Voila! That knocked a few points off the crime rates.

Giuliani knew that journalists tend to live in such an insular world, traveling around Manhattan in their taxicabs, that they have no idea what the real situation is in the slums, anyway. The funny thing is, though Giuliani's press tactics have been free of force, he is treated by the New York press corps as a Hitler wannabe.

Giuliani's "press management" worked so well, that according to a trauma nurse at Brookdale Hospital, shootings and stabbings actually did go down. Brookdale is in Brooklyn's East New York section, which since the 1980s has consistently led the city in murders. My take on this is that first off, bad guys bought into the liberal media vilification of Giuliani's police as storm troopers, and found crime less attractive. And when people heard the trains were much safer, they started riding them in much greater numbers, which itself became a deterrent to criminals.

Alas, one casualty of the numbers war was Giuliani's Transit Bureau chief, Kenneth Donoghue. Donoghue was caught radically undercounting subway crime, and forced to resign in January, 1998.

We are soon going to have a new president. Should George W. Bush win the election, he will be sorely tempted to use the Clintons' (not to mention, Giuliani's) tactics. Should Al Gore win, he'll think, NIKE-style, "Just do it."

News editors and producers might stand up to a President Bush II. After all, he's a Republican. In the case of a President Gore, they'll take the abuse and come back for more. Either way, this new precedent is bad news all around.

(I had originally published this piece at a free, bcity.com Web site, whose host, znet.com, shut down in May, 2001. That was the best Web site I ever had; not only was it free, but it was idiot-proof, and provided a free hit counter. And I got something like 80,000 hits in the first twelve months, much better than I've ever done since. It was, of course, too good to be true.

I didn't see the piece again, until I found it today at a google news group, via google's "Groups" search function.)